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Tinder Press to publish Maggie O'Farrell's 10th and 'most ambitious' novel in June 2026
Tinder Press will publish Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th and "most ambitious” novel, Land, in June 2026.
Dubbed “a multi-generational epic which opens on a windswept peninsula” by the Headline imprint, the book is set in the west of Ireland and follows its characters to Canada and India, among other places.
The editor is Mary-Anne Harrington, publisher at Tinder Press,who bought the book from Victoria Hobbs at AM Heath, negotiating rights for British and Commonwealth, excluding Canada.
Land will publish in hardback, e-book and audiobook on 2nd June 2026 in the UK, Ireland and Australia.
Tinder Press said: “Land is a powerful story of loss, reunion and hope, which was inspired by Maggie’s own family history and by the Irish landscape to which she has a deep personal attachment. Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, are working for the Ordnance Survey which is mapping the whole of Ireland. It’s 1865 and the country has been decimated by the Great Hunger.
“Tomás is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. An unsettling encounter with a copse on a remote stretch of the coast sets Tomás and his family on an unexpected journey which unearths histories old and new and changes all their lives, and the lives of those who come after them. As spellbinding and various as the landscape that inspired it, Land is an epic story of survival, for our times, and for all time.”
O’Farrell said: “Three or so years ago, I was staring out of the window on a long and delayed train journey when a sentence appeared in my head: ‘His father was ever a man of few words.’ I pictured a man and a reluctant child on a rain-soaked hillside, with surveying tools in hand. I knew immediately that I had the opening to a novel I’d long been mulling for a long time – a novel about a father and son mapping together in the west of Ireland.
“Every family has its myths; I had always heard that one of my antecedents had worked on the early maps of Ireland, but I had no idea how much truth was in this. My great-great-grandfather was not an easy man to find. It was a search that would take me to dusty stacks of archives, to churchyards, to holy wells, to windswept beaches along the Wild Atlantic Way, to remote islands and rocky hillsides. He had, I discovered, worked as a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the 1850s, not long after the Great Hunger had ravaged the country. What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time, to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?”
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The author added: “Land is a novel I’ve always wanted to write. It was only on that train journey that I saw how to begin: with a hillside, a son, and a man of few words.”
Land’s publication will follow the release of a film adaptation of Hamnet (2020, Headline) on 9th January 2026 in the UK, for which O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with academy-award-winner Chloé Zhao, also the film’s director. It stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and was directed by Zhao.
Harrington, Maggie O’Farrell’s editor at Headline, said: "Earlier this year we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication of Maggie’s first novel, After You’d Gone (Headline). It is astonishing that a quarter of a century after that remarkable early success, Maggie has gone on to become such a force in our culture.
Land is an intimate portrait of a family making a home and daring to hope for a future in aftermath of loss, and a breathtaking feat of storytelling from a novelist truly at the height of her powers. It is joyful to be announcing this new novel at a time when the film adaptation of Hamnet, testament to Maggie’s unique ability to conjure emotion on the page, is about to come to screens across the world.”
Tinder Press and Headline have published all of O’Farrell’s novels which have been translated into 43 languages around the world.
